Dundee, Scotland

I recently visited Dundee for a long weekend.

The Premier Inn Waterfront has a great location, near the train station and all the tourist sites are within walking distance. It also has a Beefeater restaurant. Three nights in Dundee was more than enough, but Edinburgh is an easy train journey away.

V&A Dundee

V&A Dundee is Scotland’s design museum. It was designed by a Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma. Their free tour at 11am or 1.30pm is well worth going on to learn more about the building’s design and architecture. It was designed to look like the rock striations found on Scotland’s coasts.

The flooring is made of Irish polished limestone that is full of fossils millions of years old.

It’s free entry except for their main exhibition. The current one, running until 5th January 2025, is Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk. Because of the weird shape of the museum, it looks from the upper floor that the exhibition would be quite small. In fact, once you enter, it is huge and absolutely fascinating reading and visually stunning. Well worth the entry fee.

To coincide with the exhibition, their afternoon tea is Japanese inspired and absolutely delicious. I had a tasty lunch there another day as well, a great atmosphere and setting.

---

Discovery Point and RRS Discovery

Next door is Discovery Point visitor centre and RRS Discovery, the 1901 3-masted Antarctic expedition ship that sailed Scott and Shackleton to the Antarctic. For me the most interesting part was seeing an example of a cross section of its construction with different types of wood (Scots pine, pitch pine, Honduras mahogany or oak, English elm and Greenheart) in layers and pockets filled with salt. In places the hull is 2 ft (61cm) thick, essential for insulation and coping with the ice. Annoyingly the receptionist didn’t tell us there was an option to buy a discounted combined ticket with the Verdant Works (which we were headed to next) so if you go remember to ask.

---

Verdant Works Museum

As someone who spins and weaves I really enjoyed visiting the Verdant Works Museum to learn about Dundees original flax/linen production and then their history of being the home of jute production and all their different uses. At one time there were 120 jute mills in Dundee, plus dye works, offices, warehouses etc. It was a huge part of Dundee’s history and definitely worth a visit. I started the tour with a stop in the cafe for a delicious soup and sandwich combo and bought myself some pretty burgundy coloured jute garden twine.

Within the exhibition space they have restored machines that were used for the processing of the jute (imported from the India subcontinent). I will be writing a blog post on my Highlandheffalump.com crafting blog about this in more detail. The work they’ve done to restore the mill and machines was impressive. A good proportion of the mills were demolished and the rest converted to apartments, offices, warehouses.

Dundee had a huge whaling history back in the day too, with the whale oil being used to soften the jute fibres.

---

McManus Galleries

The McManus Dundee art gallery and museum, housed in a Gothic Revival-style building. Entry is free, there’s a cafe and shop. I enjoyed this probably the least, perhaps because I was getting tired and I’m not a huge fan of dead stuffed animals of which there were quite a few. It has 8 galleries within it, so worth a wander since it’s free.

---

Other Sites

Outside McManus is a statue of Robert Burns and a more modern bronze statue of Oor Wullie, a famous Scottish newspaper cartoon character. His peashooter is aimed at Robert Burns 😂

Other famous Scottish designed cartoon characters include Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx, they have their own bronze statues elsewhere in the city.

The city sits on the river Tay estuary, the Firth of Tay.